Extreme Everyday Convenience

By learning your preferences and behaviors, devices around the home are now better able to serve than ever before. And as people continue to lead hectic lives, these features can be extremely helpful.

The Connected Home

Introduction

With connected devices, modern convenience is reaching new heights. Getting the inventory of your fridge, adjusting the climate in your home, monitoring activity on the premises and changing music with a voice command have never been easier.

Technical Experts

André Leon S. GradvohlIEEE Member

Han GuangjieIEEE Member

Raul ColcherIEEE Life Fellow

Yang XiangIEEE Senior Member

Assistants Exposed

A key aspect of convenience when it comes to the connected home is always-on voice control. However, that continuous listening element creates a considerable threat surface across various devices.

The most vulnerable is the personal digital assistant. After all, by default, it needs to capture the audio to receive the voice commands. Besides, it is directly connected to the network. However, smart TVs and mobile phones are also potentially vulnerable. The key measures to increase the security of these devices is to verify that the manufacturers implement authentication mechanisms.

Accounts, Passwords and Firmware

All connected devices face security threats. IoT devices vary in terms of their built-in defenses, and in terms of the protection provided by their associated app. Responsibility then falls on the user to be proactive about security.

The default password is one of the areas where the IoT device is not secure. IoT devices usually have a default password, which is vulnerable. A complicated password is better.
When registering an account, if you have to fill in your personal information, provide as little personal information as possible.
Check and update the IoT device firmware. If IoT devices have exploitable vulnerabilities, manufacturers often identify and fix problems before the hacker can access the device's environment.

The Potential of Thread

With such a wide array of IoT devices and a lack of coordination on security among manufacturers, a device may or may not have the computing power for strong encryption. Yet end-to-end encryption is crucial for protecting consumer data and for peace of mind.

Specifically for home automation systems, Thread, an Open Standard Protocol, looks like a nice alternative. It is an IP-based wireless networking protocol designed for low-power connected products. Thread allows all the devices in home systems applications to communicate with one another, including appliances, access control, climate control, energy management, lighting and safety. Thread networks are secure and encrypted. Thread uses smartphone-era authentication schemes and Advanced Encryption Standard to close security holes that exist in other wireless protocols. Only authorized devices can join the network.

Machine Learning and Security

Households around the world have a growing number of smart home devices. Since each device is a potential target, and because they’re connected, vulnerabilities in any one unit connected to the network can affect the rest.

Because of the complexity of the problem, vulnerability detection with machine learning assistance has become feasible. But challenges such as training models, diversity of devices and emerging vulnerabilities still need significant effort to be solved.

Yang XiangIEEE Senior Member, Dean of the Digital Research & Innovation Capability Platform at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia)